Korean alternative of Napster is in trouble

Extremely popular Korean song-swapping service, Soribada("sea of sound"), is in deep trouble. Two South Korean brothers, Yang Jung-hwan and Yang Il-hwan, who built the application, are charged for copyright violations and might face up to 5 years in jail.

South Korea has extremely high percentage of people who have access to the Net and access to broadband connections -- country has over 20 million Internet users. Soribada was launched in last year and was an instant success. Guys claim that they just wanted to make "South Korea's version of Napster" -- and they succeeded to do that and also succeeded to get themselves in trouble as well.

RIAK(yeah, I know you guessed this one -- Recording Industry Association of Korea) which represents over 100 labels, claims that Soribada has caused labels to lose over $154 million in last year. Although their claims seem pretty weird as South Korea's album sales rised from $292 million in 1999 to $315 million in 2000.

Soribada's technology resembles the architecture of Gnutella and other modern P2P networks, meaning that it doesn't rely on any central server like Napster did -- and therefor the service is basically unstoppable even that they throw the creators in prison.